Apart from the part about the demos themselves being "dishonest", those are a lot of good points. Demos are a bit of a strange thing, cause in order to appreciate them you need to actually know what's going on - but at the same time you also need to be able to entertain the audience who knows nothing about the hardware. I remember the winners of demoscene compos often being plain cutscenes with catchy music or funny animations rather than the ones that pushed the technical boundary of the system.HihiDanni wrote:This is something that's been on my mind for a while. Here are my thoughts:
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In the case of the SNES, Oerg866 has a good point that trying to figure out how to code stuff that could easily be done with Mode7 would be pretty superficial for a tech demo. Platform elitism is one of the dumbest things ever that gets only more dumb when people drag it up on the subject of 90s consoles in 2017. I would love to see what you can actually do with a SNES demo, as I think you could really have some impressive things that no other pre-3D console could pull off if you start getting really creative about it, just like the MegaDrive is doing its own thing.
I think the whole elitism thing on the demoscene extends to more than just platform elitism though, as there's always been this sense of friendly rivalry between groups. But like any other kind of friendly rivalry, things can get heated and some people will come across as aggressive.